WAN AWARDS 2010

Product Awards break from WAN tradition

Roca all-in-one washbasin and WC and Drainwave announced as winners of WAN AWARDS 2010 Products sector at BAU

This year WAN’s annual Product Awards were organised in collaboration with the BAU trade fair in Munich, with the winners announcement made live at the event on Monday 17th January by WAN’s Toby Redington and Exhibition Director for BAU, Mirko Arend. Mirko joined WAN’s distinguished jury panel for an animated discussion over the innovative longlist, affirming: “It was very interesting that many of these product ideas are related to the field of sustainability which will be absolutely the most important trend for the next years in architecture and as well as in the entire building sector.”

As expected, form and functionality were the order of the day, with applauded products ranging from a modular tensile fabric cladding system (ArchiClad) to energy modeller software (GRAPHISOFT EcoDesigner) and a new surface coating to effectively combat graffiti (Clearky 105).

In a break from tradition, two separate frontrunners have been chosen for as winners of the Product sector; a WAN winner and a BAU winner. The Roca all-in-one washbasin and WC by Roca Sanitario S.A was selected as the WAN winner for its ability to ‘communicate sustainability to the user within a building’, whilst the innovative Drainwave stunned the judges as a ‘great engineering solution’ and was thusly awarded the title of BAU winner 2010.

Andrew Best of Buro Happold was quick to differentiate between the victorious innovations, concluding: “The Drainwave is a remarkably unglamorous product destined to spend its life buried below the ground, but it offered a very ingenious and simple solution to avoiding problems of blocked drains, whilst the Roca all in one washbasin was a very visual demonstration of how the waste water from hand washing can be used to flush toilets.”